oh no, not another anachronism

[cimorene]

Oh no, not my guy William Morris putting a New World ingredient in Europe 700 years too early!

...came out of the house clad in a green kirtle and a gown of brazil, with a golden-hilted sword girt to her side.

—The Roots of the Mountains (1889), William Morris

brazil (plural brazils)

Noun. (obsolete) A red-orange dye obtained from brazil wood. [14th–17th c.]

ETA: this might be wrong! Thanks to mildred_of_midgard, I now know the Wiktionary entry quoted above was incomplete 😠 and didn't inform me that brasilwood was a commonly used source of pigment/dye throughout Europe in the high middle ages and came from East Asia, frequently Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). (Brazil, the country, was named for the wood, because a close relative — the plant now known as Brazil wood — was plentiful there before being exploited almost entirely away.) The question remains whether this trade really did go so far back, but it's not so implausible after all. Morris was likely familiar with the dye's usage after 1000 CE and extrapolating backwards, as with the fiddle which was definitely incorrect, but it is possible that the wood was present in the book's setting (probably the 4th - 5th c. CE, somewhere in the a Carpathian region - see Wikipedia Hlöðskviða (also Hlǫðskviða and Hlǫðsqviða), known in English as The Battle of the Goths and Huns and occasionally known by its German name Hunnenschlachtlied for discussion of the possible historical context of the Old Norse heroic poem on the subject).

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

Also, related to the Huns, your first post about anachronisms made me think of this thesis, which I read eons ago. Without having read Morris, I wondered if any of the "Vorzeit" concepts in the first 12 or so pages apply. If so, anachronisms would be a feature; if not, they would be a bug. From your description, it sounds like you think it's the latter, but since he's drawing on these older epics, I wondered if his narrative might be drawing on some of the same literary techniques that result in anachronisms. Tolkien definitely employed medieval literary *techniques*, not just events and material culture, and so Morris might be, too.

In particular, your comment "I mean, he literally calls them Huns!" made me think, "But the term 'Hun' literally got applied to many different peoples!" It's why even in WWI (and maybe WWII? I forget), invading Germans were called "Huns" by Brits.

If you look at the Wikipedia article for Huns, it says:

In medieval German legend, the Huns were identified with the Hungarians, with their capital of Etzelburg (Attila-city) being identified with Esztergom or Buda.[298] The Old Norse Thidrekssaga, however, which is based on North German sources, locates Hunaland in northern Germany, with a capital at Soest in Westphalia, [299] while Attila is described as an usurpator from Frisia, who conquered the Hun country after its king Milias died. In other Old Norse sources, the term Hun is sometimes applied indiscriminately to various people, particularly from south of Scandinavia.[300] From the thirteenth-century onward, the Middle High German word for Hun, hiune, became a synonym for giant, and continued to be used in this meaning in the forms Hüne and Heune into the modern era.[301] In this way, various prehistoric megalithic structures, particularly in Northern Germany, came to be identified as Hünengräber (Hun graves) or Hünenbetten (Hun beds).[302]

And while 1) don't trust Wikipedia blindly, obviously, and 2) I am not a medievalist, I did a fair bit of medieval studies in college and grad school, and this phenomenon does jive with my memories of what I learned. It wasn't only the Huns, either; various ethnonyms would get applied in ways that we now consider ahistorical or unhistorical.

So while it's possible that Morris did tie himself down to circa 500 CE in other ways, merely having Hun incursions is not sufficient to prove that. I would be interested to know, from your reading, if there's any reason, other than our modern, sensu stricto conception of what a Hun is, to believe that Morris is tying himself down to a particular chronology, rather than using tropes like "Huns" thematically.

[cimorene]

No, I know it's true that huns didn't literally mean Huns and welsh didn't literally mean Welsh (although maybe in both cases it's a word that means foreign getting later tied to a specific case?).

There are a lot of factors in this story, starting with being apparently a few centuries after the battles with the Roman Empire, the geography, and the descriptions of the invaders, which definitely aren't possible to apply to any human people, as pointed out in the introduction I quoted, but at the same time they are inarguably Asian by physical descriptions (and the inaccurate and fantastical elements seem related to classic medieval orientalism to me, although the writer of the introduction contends that they make it not racist by reason of being fantastic).

The Huns aren't the only historical candidates for setting, but if one were to treat this as a text that CAN be pinned down to a specific historical inspiration, there are still probably limited candidates. But actually, I don't think it's likely that any specific poem or saga, let alone battle or incursion, is behind this. The Hlöðskviða I mentioned in the ETA was certainly familiar to him given his interest in old Norse literature etc, and might have given him an idea, but just reading the article on it makes clear that the content is completely different (although I do find the theories of historians about its historical setting interesting, and potentially valuable).

But still, the novel (all his writing) is very much concerned with the lifestyle and society of his Goths, and Morris was very knowledgeable about and interested in that, especially visually and in terms of all the arts and artisans and related technologies. So a mental anchoring point, or points, to inform my mental images are necessary (and unavoidable)!